The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its partners are wrapping up an analysis of field testing done earlier this year of the first operational prototypes of the Generation-3 BioWatch system with all indications that it “worked well,” says Bob Hooks, deputy assistant secretary for Weapons of Mass Destruction at the DHS Office of Health Affairs (OHA).
Hooks tells TR2 that he’s not prepared to say the testing was “unequivocally” successful until the results are fully analyzed but he expects that once that is done to be able to go before the department’s top oversight board later this fall to get approval to begin a four-city operational test and evaluation (OT&E) next fall of the Gen-3 system or systems.
The Acquisition Review Board will be asked to approve low-rate initial production (LRIP) of Gen-3 to enter into the OT&E phase, which is slated to begin by the end of FY ’12 or early FY ’13, Hooks says.
Northrop Grumman [NOC] built the current Gen-3 prototypes for the filed testing in Chicago but Hooks says there is no guarantee that the company will advance to the OT&E phase. OHA, which operates the current BioWatch program in place around 30 or so major urban areas of the country and is managing the Gen-3 effort, last month released a draft Request for Proposal (RFP) for Phase II of Gen-3 (TR2, Aug. 31).
The final RFP is expected to be out later next month—although Hooks says sometime this fall—and will give other companies an opportunity to compete to build systems for OT&E, he says.
Last year United Technologies Corp. [UTX] failed to move into the prototyping stage in the Gen-3 program while Northrop Grumman did. Still, OHA has wanted to keep its options open to take advantage of development work other companies have been doing on their biological-detection systems the past few years while DHS focused its Gen-3 development program funding on Northrop Grumman and UTC.
At earlier stages of the Gen-3 effort, when it was managed by the DHS Science and Technology branch, additional companies were involved but were let go as their technologies failed to meet OHA’s requirements at the time.
While other companies will have the chance to enter, or re-enter, the Gen-3 effort, it would seem that Northrop Grumman is in a good position having gone through the field testing and manufactured prototypes. The draft RFP for Phase II seeks technologies that are relatively mature so that as Hooks says, they can “spin up production” in nine months to a year in order to participate in OT&E.
Still, while Northrop Grumman has held its own so far, Hook says that DHS has awarded the company three contracts for engineering change proposals that he expects the company would work into its proposal for production units for Phase II. Two of those change proposals have to do with improving the efficiency of the air collector and improving the optical reading component of the assay.
These are improvements that “could be used by anyone that would improve both the capability of the system and the maintenance of the system,” Hooks says. He expects Northrop Grumman to implement the changes by the end of this year.
OHA is seeking $25 million from Congress in FY ’12 to purchase 90 LIIP units for the OT&E phase of the Gen-3 program. The House has already approved the appropriations as has the Senate Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee.
The OT&E efforts at each of the four locations, which will include Chicago again, are expected to last three to six months with all related work expected to be done by the end of FY ’13. Hooks hopes multiple contractors are able to proceed into OT&E.
The first generation of BioWatch consists of air samplers located in major urban areas around the country as well as a local laboratory response networks. The samples are retrieved manually and taken to nearby laboratories for analysis. The process is costly and time consuming.
The Gen-3 systems are supposed to collect air samples and then several times a day automatically analyze those samples for the presence of potentially dangerous pathogens and provide real-time, networked alerts to public health officials and authorities.
The development of the third-generation BioWatch system so far has taken several years longer than expected as the actual development of the “laboratory in a box” concept has been challenging, forcing DHS officials and even Congress to accept that it is no easy task.
Over time, Hooks would like the BioWatch architecture to be open, that is subsystems and even systems could be switched out as upgrades are made and new technology is introduced, without having to rely on a proprietary solution or a single vendor. There will be opportunities for companies to come in to the program in “later years” to upgrade the technology, he says.
Once OT&E is complete, Hooks hopes that late in FY ’13 or early FY ’14 he can go back to the ARB for a full-rate production decision. OHA is currently planning on acquiring 2,600 Gen-3 units for deployment at 160 indoor locations and 50 major urban areas around the U.S.